A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge

Chapter Six: Apophatic Thought as the Missing Mean between Radically Secular and Radically Orthodox Theology

271 C h a p t e r S i x APoPhAtiC thoUght As the mis s ing meAn between r AdiCAlly seCUlAr And r AdiCAlly orthodox theology Glücklich, die wissen, daß hinter allen Sprachen das Unsägliche steht. (Happy they who know that behind all languages lies the unsayable.) —Rainer Maria Rilke i One of the important gains for the perspective of negative or apophatic theology that I have developed up to this point is its potential for enabling uncircumscribed dialogue among religious faiths and, perhaps even more importantly, between religious faith and secular culture. In order to demonstrate this potential, it will be instructive to pay close attention to what are apparently deeply opposed approaches to contemporary thinking in 272 P H I L O S O P H y A N D T H E O L O G y philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. Postmodern approaches to religion are, of course, myriad, and I am going to mention only a small selection of them. However, the issues raised are representative and are played out along similar lines across the whole range of philosophies and cultures in our postmodern world fractured by competing, sometimes warring religions and their perennial sworn opponents. I argue that a contemporary philosophy of the unsayable, extending the traditional insights of negative theology, can serve to break down and disarm these antagonisms, which reflect and foment potentially violent and destructive conflicts in society today.1 On the one hand, we find secularized approaches to theology stemming from the Death of God movement of the 1960s, particularly as pursued by North American religious thinkers such as Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Carl Raschke, Charles Winquist, John Caputo, and others, including more recently Clayton Crockett, who stress that the possibilities for theological discourse are fundamentally altered by the unprecedented conditions of our contemporary world. Our world today, in their view, is constituted wholly on a plane of immanence, without need of reference to “God” as a transcendent reality, to such an extent that traditional appeals to faith in an omnipotent, wholly other divinity or in an other world and afterlife become difficult to take as more than willful selfdeception and deliberate blindness to our actual human condition. This American trend has certain affinities in its secularizing emphases with European philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, who also think essentially out of the death of God that was announced by Nietzsche. This announcement had been anticipated by Hegel and was followed up in influential ways by Heidegger, with his program of a deconstruction of metaphysics or, more precisely, his taking up the task of a “destruction of the history of ontology” (“die Aufgabe einer Destruktion der Geschichte der Ontologie”) declared in paragraph 6 of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). On the other hand, we hear the proclamation of a new lease on life for theology based on its traditional affirmation of divine transcendence over against the putative arrogance of all assertions of human autonomy. This proclamation is advanced provocatively by theologians leagued under the banner of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy, discussed at length in the last A Mean between Radically Secular and Radically Orthodox Theology 273 essay. Emanating from England, originally from the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and ’90s, this movement includes in its core such theological thinkers as John Milbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, Rowan Williams, and Phillip blond. These theologians have linked their approach with that of the predominantly French nouvelle théologie, beginning with Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, and Hans Urs von balthasar in the mid-twentieth century and followed up by Catholic theologians such as Jean-yves Lacoste, Louis-Marie Chauvet, and Olivier-Thomas Venard today. both the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental versions of this outlook stress that theology, as embedded in traditional Christian belief, is not only crucial for interpreting the past but also continues to offer a privileged and uniquely penetrating discourse on the true nature of reality even in the postmodern world. These theologians hold that it is necessary to start from theological revelation as expressed in the Christian vision and its narrative in order to understand the world—and not the other way around, as is the common conviction of secular theologians. Starting from the world in its actuality—this world as it reveals itself in human life and...